Why collaborations fail

by Stephanie Golden

In my experience, there are two basic reasons why book collaborations don’t work
out:

There’s a problem with the concept or contents of the book itself.

The expert and writer can’t work well together.

This article tackles the first reason, which in my experience is the primary one,
especially since it often underlies the second reason.

Should this idea really be a book?

I was contacted once by a therapist who wanted to write a book based on the saying
that the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. She used this concept very
successfully in her therapy. But when I asked her what the contents of the book would
be, she was stymied. She hadn’t even begun to think about how her therapeutic work
might translate into general principles and practical advice.

Another prospective author wanted to write a book about relationships. He had a long,
happy marriage and thought he could give good advice. He did have a number of quite
sensible ideas, but not enough to fill a book. They could all have fit in one solid
magazine article, with some lively stories as examples.

Not every idea is best given to the world as a book. Books require a lot of details.

So the first question to ask is: does the expert have enough material to make a book?
Are there enough ideas, with facts and examples to support them, to fill eight to
ten chapters of 20 pages each?

If not, maybe the concept is best expressed in one or several articles in a magazine,
or on a website or blog.

Agents and editors tell us that a surprisingly large number of writers can’t clearly
explain what their books are about. These authors usually can detail their motivation,
philosophies, and their personal dreams, but they can’t describe the specific benefits
their books will give their readers.

If you can’t describe your book clearly, Frishman and Spizman note, agents and editors
will assume that they won’t be able to sell it.

I worked with a couple of other therapists whose ideas were much further developed.
But they still couldn’t hone in on a central concept. In response to my questions,
one idea would morph into another, then into a third. I kept rewriting the proposal,
and though it changed, it never got clearer. There actually were several editors
longing for one of these books, but they couldn’t buy it because the expert never
came up with the 25-words-or-less “handle” (as the industry calls it) that the sales
reps could use to pitch the bookstores.

As the writer, I shared some of the blame. I had far less experience then, and maybe
my questions weren’t good enough. Or possibly the experts were just incapable of
distilling their work into that elusive single concept, and I failed to recognize
this.

Generally, it’s the professional writer’s responsibility to determine whether trying
to write a book based on the expert’s ideas is just spinning both their wheels. It’s
hard to say this to someone who’s in love with her ideas—but that’s part of the job.

The proposed book doesn’t seem to offer anything that’s not already out there.

An expert may be extremely knowledgeable and very successful in his or her field.
But so may dozens of other people, some of whom have already written books about
the same topic.

If there are one, two, or more books in print about treating insomnia, or finding
a better job, or dealing with your teenage daughter, that’s not necessarily a bad
thing: it demonstrates that there’s a solid market out there for your subject. But
what will your book add that’s new and different enough to entice people to buy it?
As the writer, it’s my job to explain this in the marketing section of the proposal,
in a way that publishers find compelling. But it’s the expert’s responsibility to
give me something solid to tout.

The expert doesn’t really want to tackle these problems.

Some experts I’ve known were absolutely determined to write their book, and that
determination carried them past every obstacle. If the concept was fuzzy, they bit
the bullet, faced the vagueness in their thinking, and figured out what they really
wanted to say (with brainstorming help from me). If there wasn’t enough detail to
support their points, they went out and did the necessary research. If one publisher
said no, they went after another. They had the fire in the belly that you need to
write a book.

With others, extracting material for the book was like pulling teeth—I turned into
the enforcer, instead of the supporter. Sometimes I can do research or interviews
myself that fill in the gaps. But I can’t make someone else’s book up out of whole
cloth—especially if much of it depends on personal experience or specialized expertise
that I don’t have.

I can write a book for someone whose ideas I don’t agree with, or even for someone
who’s not so easy to work with. But I can’t write one if there’s no “there” there.